OCEANIC DISCOVERIES. 623 



two poets, linked together by the closest ties of friendship, 

 Petrarch and Boccacio. A monk of Calabria, Barlaam, who 

 had long resided in Greece under the patronage of the Emperor 

 Andronicus, was the instructor of both* 1 . They were the first to 

 begin to make a careful collection of Roman and Greek manu- 

 scripts ; and a taste for a comparison of languages had even been 

 awakened in Petrarchf, whose philological acumen seemed to 

 strive towards the attainment of a more general contempla- 

 tion of the universe. Emanuel Chrysoloras, who was sent as 

 Greek ambassador to Italy and England (1391), Cardinal 

 Bessarion of Trebisond, Gemistus Pietho, and the Athenian 

 Demetrius Chalcondylas, to whom we owe the first printed 

 edition of Homer, w r ere all valuable promoters of the study of 

 the Greek writers J. All these came from Greece before the 

 eventful taking of Constantinople, (29th May 1453;) Con- 

 stantine Lascaris alone, whose forefathers had once sat on the 

 Byzantine throne, came later to Italy. He brought with him 

 a precious collection of Greek manuscripts, now buried in the 

 rarely used library of the Escurial. The first Greek book 

 w r as printed only fourteen years before the discovery of 

 America, although the invention of printing, was pro- 

 bably made simultaneously and wholly independently, by Gut- 

 tenberg in Strasburg and Mayence, and by Lorenz Yausson 

 Koster at Haarlem, between 1436 and 1439, and, therefore, in 

 the fortunate period of the first immigration of the learned 

 Greeks into Italy. || 



* Heeren, Gesch. der dassisclien Litteratur, bd. i. s. 284-290. 



t Klaproth, Memoir es relatives a I'Asie, t. iii. p. 113. 



The Florentine edition of Homer of 1488; but the first printed 

 Greek book was the grammar of Constantine Lascaris, in 1476. 



Villemain, Melanges historiques et litteraires, t. ii. p. 135. 



II The result of the investigations of the librarian Ludwig Wachlcr, 

 at Breslau (see his Geschichte der Litteratur, 1833, th. i. s. 12-23). 

 Printing without moveable types does not go back, even in China, be- 

 yond the beginning of the tenth century of our era. The first four books 

 of Confucius were printed, according to Klaproth, in the province of 

 Szlitschun, between 890 and 925 ; and the description of the technical 

 manipulation of the Chinese printing press might have been read in 

 / western countries even as early as 1310, in Easchid-eddin's Persian his-^ 



tory of the rulers of Khatai. According to the most recent results of 



s the important researches of Stanislas Julien, however, an ironsmith in 



/ China itself, between the years 1041 and 1048 A.D., or almost 400 years 



before Quttenberg, would seem to have used moveable types, made of 



VM-* 



